Fetch vs. MileIQ vs. Xero

We use Fetch alongside our website that's built on WordPress. We have some databases set up on our site that pull from Fetch folders, and in some other places on the site, we simply link to files we have stored on our server through Fetch. There is nothing fancy about Fetch—it just gets the job done!

Incentivized

MileIQ is a great tool for users that need to track their own business mileage to claim on expense reports. The phone app is easy to set up and use when classifying drives. it will occasionally ask you if you want to auto-classify frequent drives to further minimize the manual tasks of tracking mileage.

Incentivized

I am a massage and physical therapist. We are not a fancy business but business admin can take a lot of time and effort. Xero came recommended to me by colleagues in the sector. You raise invoices, you get paid. and you pay your bills. These are all daily scenarios for most businesses and Xero does this particularly well. Since my accountant can query my records directly, this greatly saves on bookkeeping time when it is time to do the company returns.

Incentivized

• Consistency: Fetch gives our employees a single portal to enter expenses, avoiding email confusion and lost paperwork.
• Clarity: Fetch allowed us to set up departments with one single 'approver'. This way employees would submit expenses and their boss would get a notification reminding them to review pending expenses.
• Support: It was easy to communicate with humans at Fetch and they were able to help us with questions we had.

Incentivized

• track mileage very accurately
• easily categorize business versus personal trips
• reports are quite simple to generate and forward to DEXT
• settings are easy to set-up for proper government approved mileage rates

• Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
• Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
• Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.

Incentivized

• Multi-currency - you can only submit expenses in USD and pay them back in USD. That hasn't been a problem yet, but I guess we'll have to ask employees to do their own conversion if they submit a non-USD receipt.
• Needs to have employees install the iPhone or Android app

• Integrate the paid version's admin console into the phone app for easier management.

Incentivized

• Having different email addresses for different parts of a customer's business (eg invoices and statements to different places)
• Easily seeing the text of emails that have been sent through Xero
• More easily archiving old pay items. Our HR software updates rates when awards are updated which means a lot of old pay rates are in the system and they have multiple clicks to archive each one. Clicking the ones to archive in bulk and then just click archive for all would be much more efficient.

Incentivized

In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.

MileIQ is extremely easy to use. The phone app has a great flow. Drive classification can be as easy as swiping left and right. Users can access their reports in 2-3 steps. The admin console is easy to navigate and makes it simple to invite new users and remove old ones.

Incentivized

As a standalone software, it allows users to fulfill most of the basic functions (e.g. transaction input and report generation) simply and conveniently. It also allows for multiple APIs to help augment various tasks that accounting-adjacent (e.g. claims processing). The cloud based model and portability to mobile devices allows tasks to be carried out in a more convenient way.

We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.

On a good day, things worked but after upgrades, things began to slow and or not work at all at times. I coined the moving circle while I waited as the "Xero Wheel of Death". Sometimes it never stopped and force quitting was necessary.

Incentivized

Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.

The format was great; someone was there to ask questions or help if you were stuck.

Incentivized

All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.

If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.

Incentivized

In my previous role our company used Concur. Compared to Concur, Fetch is far simpler and easier to implement for a smaller organization like ours.

Each of the products I listed had their own list of drawbacks, but the one thing they all had in common, which was right on top of that list of drawbacks, was ease of use. I struggled to get myself accustomed to each system and struggled, but when it came to getting a client to even try and use it was when the true struggle started. Just found it easier to make use of Xero from the very beginning.

I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing

Incentivized

• Fetch saves us time while working on our website.
• The low cost of Fetch saves on our overall budget.

Incentivized

• Very automated, less than 10 minutes a week to categorize drives, another 10 minutes at the end of the month to create a report. Easy and efficient use of employee time.
• Easily integrates with our Expense Management System and Accounting packages
• No manual intervention at all required by employees - no tracking required on their part.

• Xero is a basic accounting system that performs basic accounting tasks easily and accurately. For that, it provides a positive impact on our day to day accounting operations.
• Because of Xero's basic structure, I feel it lacks some of the sophistication that some users want and need. The ability to create unique custom reports would enhance the impact Xero would have on meeting business objectives by providing current and useful accounting information.
• In my opinion, Xero's lack of focus on their customers - their users - is a real issue with me. In my opinion, those of us that are in the trenches that work with the system on a daily basis have to deal with the shortcomings of the system with the knowledge that Xero support refuses to address the operational issues that make their user's lives difficult. I feel if Xero would focus on truly making their software better from a users point of view, it has the potential to be a great system.